From a notebook entry about Kafka

 

When Josef K. was around twenty two, his last year at the university, he discovered the existence of a secret society which counted certain students and even professors among its adherents. In fact, it didn’t resemble other secret societies. It was very difficult for certain people to become members. Many, who ardently wanted to become a member, never succeeded. Others, by contrast, became members without trying, or even knowing that they had become members of this society. One was never, besides, totally sure of being a member. There were many who believed they belonged to it and weren’t, in fact, members at all, or were members in name only. However much they had been initiated, they were less part of the society than many who didn’t even have the slightest knowledge of the existence of the society. In fact, the former had undergone the tests of a false initiation, the rituals of which were as codified as those of a true initiation: the false initiation was designed to put off the scent those who were unworthy of being initiated, but who had somehow found out about the secret society. But even the most authentic members, those who had reached the most elevated places in this society, did not know whether their initiation was authentic or not. This was a secret that could not be revealed. It could happen that a member attained, due to a series of authentic initiations, a real rank, and that consequently, without being warned or in any way becoming objects of the confidence of those who supposedly knew these things, they would be instructed to initiate others under the belief that they, being authentic initiates, were licensed to oversee authentic initiations, only to actually oversee false initiations.

Thus, it became the subject of innumerable conversations among the membership whether it was better to be admitted to a lesser but real level in the hierarchy or to occupy an exalted position, but an illusory one, that is, one contaminated with a false initiation somewhere along the path to that high position. In any case, no one was sure of the solidity of their level, and from this arose the ambiguities that surrounded the legitimacy of orders or suggestions issued within the secret society by those who supposedly ran the society.

And, in fact, the situation was even more complicated than this relatively simple divide between false and true initiations make it seem. Certain postulants were admitted to the highest levels without undertaking any tests. Others were invested with offices and powers that they did not even know about, since they could not be told. Who, after all, was certain enough of his or her own rank to tell them? And, frankly, there was no need to be a postulant: certain elevated officers didn’t even know the secret society existed, even though these officers had to be respected if they issued a command.

The powers of the superior members were unlimited; they carried in themselves, in their own presence, a kind of emanation of the secret society as a whole. This emanation had strange powers. For instance, just being in the presence of one of these people was enough to transform an banal meeting or encounter – say, the encounter defined by going up to the counter of a coffee bar and ordering a latte – into a meeting of the secret society. Similarly it could transform a birthday party or a concert into a meeting of the society. From that time afterwards, all the humans present at such occasions became living links within the society to other members. In this way, the extent of the secret society was enormous, and if power corresponded simply to extension, than the secret society was certainly the most powerful secret society that ever existed, at least in this society.

However high the level of the initiation, it was never permitted to inform the initiate of the purpose pursued by the secret society. But there have always been, given the principles governing initiation, and the promiscuity that comes with size, some initiates who were actually informers or traitors, and it was from these that the rumor took root that the goal of the society was to keep its purpose secret. As these informers and traitors could, actually, have been double agents, there has been discussion about, and even papers written to prove, that the purpose of the society was actually guarded by having traitors and informers broadcast the purpose of the society.

Josef K. was horrified to learn that this secret society was so large and so manifold, and even more to learn that he might, without knowing it, be a member of the society, and even a powerful member at that. The latter possibility implicated him in making others, say, those attending a birthday party he attended, members of the secret society; he pondered whether, morally, he had a duty to call up the people at various parties he had attended and warn them that they might, by being in contact with him, been recruited into this secret society. On the other hand, calling people up like this could be construed as betraying the secrets of the society, and this posed the question as to whether he had the moral right to do this.

Such was his position after the day he lost his ticket to the metro, which was the first link in the confusing and contradictory chain of circumstances that put him in contact with the secret society, whose existence until then he had been unaware of.